Last month, a federal court in Texas ruled that a Republican gerrymander, expected to give the GOP five extra seats in the US House, must be struck down because of incompetent lawyering by President Donald Trump’s Justice Department.

In August, at Trump’s urging, Texas Republicans redrew their state’s congressional maps to make them much more friendly to the GOP. This led Democrats to push for retaliatory gerrymanders in blue states. California voters backed a ballot referendum allowing that state to redraw its maps to make them more Democratic, and Virginia may also redraw its maps once Democrats take full control of its government this winter.

These transparent attempts to rig congressional elections to benefit one party or the other are permissible largely because of the Republican justices’ decision in Rucho v. Common Cause (2019), which held that federal courts may not intervene to prevent partisan gerrymandering.

Key Takeaways

• A federal court struck down Texas’s Republican gerrymander because of a Justice Department letter telling Texas to draw an illegal racial gerrymander.
• Texas asks the Supreme Court to reinstate the maps for two reasons, one of which has alarming implications.
• If Texas prevails on its most radical argument, it could allow states to immunize virtually any election law from judicial review.

Yet, while the Court’s Republican majority is normally very tolerant of biased legislative maps — they are expected to eliminate the Voting Rights Act’s safeguards against racial gerrymandering in the Court’s current term — most of the Republican justices still believe that one form of gerrymandering is not allowed. As Justice Samuel Alito wrote in Alexander v. South Carolina NAACP (2024), “if a legislature gives race a predominant role in redistricting decisions, the resulting map is subjected” to the most skeptical level of constitutional scrutiny.

This matters because, as Texas Republicans were trying to decide whether to redraw the state’s maps earlier this year, Trump’s Justice Department wrote a letter threatening to sue the state unless it enacted an illegal racial gerrymander. The letter claimed, falsely, that it is illegal for a state to draw any map that includes a district where white people are in the minority, and two other racial groups make up the majority. DOJ told Texas that it must redraw its congressional maps to eliminate several districts that fit this description.

The Justice Department, in other words, effectively ordered Texas to give race a predominant role when it redrew its maps — changing the configuration of several districts in........

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